the landscape after cruelty
by orpheus-under-starlight
Summary: Claude reckons with the gentleness of love, renewing and steadfast, when so much else in his life has been forged from blood and bone.


**the landscape after cruelty**

Claude reckons with the gentleness of love, renewing and steadfast, when so much else in his life has been forged from blood and bone.

* * *

He's thought about the Heroes' Relics for most of his life.

In the back of his mind, the images play on repeat: diagrams and illustrations, tales and myths, wild fantasies of weapons that can sunder the heavens and the earth and make dreams into reality. He thinks on these things in a back alley in one of the seaside towns of his childhood, blood in his teeth and a fierce, if false, smile on his lips. He thinks about how the children attacking the crown prince of Almyra might look if they knew these things existed.

Claude is seven and he knows that fists alone aren't going to change the world. They're only going to get him out of scrapes like this.

And temporarily, at that.

No, Claude needs a weapon. He needs something bigger than the sky that embraces him in the night; something more vast than the stars, stretched out far beyond any human being's reckoning.

He needs a miracle. The gods may not exist, but the Heroes' Relics do.

All the legends say the people who wield them make miracles happen.

"That's my boy," his father says, rough, callused hands cupping his face. His beard tickles Claude's forehead as he presses a kiss to the crown of his head. There's sadness in his voice, but warmth, too, and that's enough for him. "Holding your own, eh?"

His mother's hands are kinder than the hands of the children who tried to give him a black eye earlier, her fingers gentle in his hair but no less fierce for it. She flicks his little braid with a deep affection. "If you want to wield a Relic one day, my love, you'll have to start training now."

"I can do it," Claude promises, buoyed by their love, their pride. _He_ knows the blood that runs in his veins doesn't make him a coward. They do, too. He just has to grow up, just has to grow stronger, and then he'll be able to show everyone else, too—show them that the world is so much larger than they think, that no one is a coward just because of where they come from. "I'll work with Nader every day—"

His father erupts into laughter. He feels it against his cheek, bundled up in his father's arms like he is, and the vibration that reverberates in every bone of his body feels more like home than any place he's ever known. "Once he gets back from the front, my son, but not before then. I have no doubt that the two of you will be coming home bruised every day."

"In the mean time, you and I can begin your training," his mother tells him, and his birthday is four moons away, but Claude feels like that promise just about covers the next few birthdays' worth of presents... until he turns eleven, at least. That's when he'll ask for a poison kit. They don't need to know that he's been working on that already. Or that he was testing its effects on his bullies earlier.

* * *

Nothing much changes when he comes to Fódlan.

It's immensely disappointing. Soul-crushing, almost—but not quite, because what he comes to realize is that the way people in Fódlan perceive outsiders means that his dream has just expanded. No longer is it just about showing his people that the people of Fódlan are not cowards.

The world needs to change. Hearts and minds need to be softened. Transformed on a fundamental level. To Claude, the status quo has never really been acceptable; changing it is just that much more urgent, even though the fulfillment of his dreams is years and years away from where he stands, newly enrolled in the Officers' Academy and soon to depart from Riegan territory to make the journey to Garreg Mach Monastery.

He'll have resources there—clues and documents and perhaps tactical allies to be made—so, in a way, he looks forward to it. He's playing the long game and he has been for years. This is just one more step along the way. An important one.

Claude doesn't exactly believe in fate, or destiny, or any higher power save for the stars that have guided his nights. But for some reason he has a feeling that things are about to change. That whatever comes next, he's going to be faced with a choice.

He has every intention of making the right one.

* * *

When Claude von Riegan first meets Byleth Eisner, what he sees first is not her power, her skill, or even her bearing, stoic and taciturn as it is.

No. It's dark out and his mind is spinning, trying to figure out why there are bandits in this neck of the woods at this time of the night, set so perfectly, almost like it was planned—and the train of his thoughts gets interrupted by the appearance of a strange woman who steps closer to the mercenary man when she spots them, like she's ready to protect him from anything.

Like she'd die for him, if the need arose.

There is a furious kindness in her that fascinates him from the very start. In those twilight hours, the thing that cinches it for him is that she barely knows Edelgard. She's a mercenary. Kills for coin.

But for whatever reason, she saves Edelgard's life without hesitation.

Claude wants to know _why._ Always has. Why does Byleth live as she does, wearing that blank face, screaming out her interior life through her fashion choices and her blunt jokes? Why does she stick to him on the walk back? Why does she choose the Golden Deer—choose _him, _despite Dimitri and Edelgard practically panting at her heels for her allegiance? Why doesn't she know anything about her own life? Why does she strike him so much as a dead woman slowly learning to live again?

Why, given all that, is he the only one in the following weeks who seems to be able to see clearly that she's just as human as the rest of them?

* * *

Maybe, he thinks months and a multitude of trials later, it's that she relies on him from the very start. They work together in almost everything, up to and including his search for information on the history of the Relics. Her leadership of the Golden Deer is more like _their_ leadership: Claude teaches her about the way things work around the monastery, about the simple and the human, and she teaches him how to win a war. (Funny, that neither of them have ever waged a Fódlandian one.)

"Most of what I know comes from my father," Byleth says one night in her quarters over tea and long-forgotten lesson plans laid out on parchment. Her hand rests lightly on a well-worn book labeled _Tactics Primer._ Jeralt's gift to her, she told him earlier. After a moment of thought, she curls her hands around her cup. The familiar aroma of pine needle wafts through the air. Claude watches as she lifts the cup to her lips and takes in a small sip, then sets it down and looks back at him. "Though... how I know that... he must have told me, at some point."

She has a small smile on her face. He isn't sure she knows—isn't sure she can know, that the knowing of such an expression on her own face is something she would be able to comprehend the meaning of.

Claude hums, for once not summoning a smile to match what he says next. He doesn't need to here. (And isn't that refreshing, isn't it peculiar—) "It seems to me that you and your father don't communicate in so many words, Teach."

"Hmm." Another sip, thoughtful this time. "That's true. I hadn't noticed."

"Nonverbal communication is still a kind of communication, I guess," he says, and the smile that cracks his face is a degree of genuine that, in his heart of hearts, does not surprise him in the least. "I can just imagine what you must have been like as a child. He would have had to learn your tells to provide for you, after all."

Byleth pauses. Her eyes are momentarily assessing—he's seen the look before, has learned to recognize it as her form of uncertainty. She's at pains to maintain the boundary between professor, friend, and student, though he's fairly certain that everyone sees the rules as being a little different for her because of her young age. _(Yes,_ it is absolutely insane that Rhea made her a professor. _No, _nobody understands why. Especially not Byleth, who has expressed more than once her concerns about teaching a bunch of bloodless children to kill.)

"Claude—"

"If you can't tell me, you can't tell me," he interrupts, leaning back in his chair.

Byleth's brows furrow the slightest bit. "I was going to say that I can't _every_ time. But... just this once."

"Ah, story time!" He sits up and tucks his feet onto the seat of the chair, leaning forward with a grin. "C'mon, Teach, let's hear it."

It's nice to know that he falls more into the category of _friend._ That she'd trust him with the precious little she truly remembers of her own life. They've worked closely enough for long enough that he's found himself truly fond of her—not necessarily just _Professor_ Byleth, the kind hand and guide to most all his fellow classmates, whose unknowing (unnatural) charisma has drawn people from all across Fódlan into the Golden Deer regardless of origin or rank, but also the Byleth that he's gotten to know over evenings like these. A Byleth that can afford to be a little more herself and a little less the persona she's taken on to balance everything the Church seems to expect of her—despite, he thinks sometimes, the Church's best efforts to give her more than she can handle.

He can't deny her power, no. Honestly, only someone stark raving mad would.

Neither can he deny that he has need of that power. Claude still needs a miracle, all these years later, and his Teach might just be the thing he's been looking for.

But he firmly believes now that Byleth is more than just Teach. More than the Professor. In fact, being the Professor is really a very small part of the life she's lived—it's just the most recent, albeit according to her probably not the strangest.

("We always got the oddest jobs in Goneril territory." A pause, and then she shakes her head. Her hair, newly mint green with an infusion of untold power, gleams under the torchlight. "Why are they all...?"

"Must be something in the water," Claude suggests, earning a snort that is alarmingly heartwarming.)

Claude is not entirely a fool, no matter what Judith likes to accuse him of after the roundtable conferences he spends testing boundaries while he's still under his grandfather's protection. He's gotten attached. He wants her to see the new world he dreams of. He wants to know what she'll think of it. He wants to walk in step with her, shoulders brushing, and teach her anything she wants to know.

He can envision a life like that. Easy.

A life with her.

The thought burns in his mind for reasons he knows he can't fully acknowledge. So he retreats from it, sets it aside, and returns his attention to Byleth, who has drawn in a breath and begun to tell him about how she learned to fish.

* * *

_My dream, in truth, is a selfless one. But I need power to make it a reality._

Byleth didn't seem surprised that night, and even though it feels like ages ago, the memory of it hums in him. Her lack of surprise had the feel, the tone, that she'd guessed as much. And that indefinable look she was giving him—

"Claude," she's saying, tapping his arm with a calloused finger. The library candles are in the process of being topped off by a monk; they're up late, seated in a corner where they can both see the entrance and the upper floor, because he'd asked for this session last-minute and she can't sleep. He'd be sorrier, but he's been getting the feeling more and more that this is the kind of thing he's going to need in the very near future. "Focus."

He raises his brows. "What? I am focusing. Look—to route a navy of this size, it'll take a lot more than a few battles aground. That's tried and true; they'd predict it in a minute, and then I'd have to come up with a plan on the fly, and I can't imagine why, but you don't tend to like those plans. So you have to control the terrain, sure, but there's more than one way to do that, even at sea."

Byleth stares at him, blank-faced. "Fire is not always the solution."

"But it's _often_ a solution," he says sweetly.

"For the purposes of this assignment," Byleth says, a shrewd look crossing her eyes, "fire is not a solution. You're both at sea, and you're too close for the fire not to spread to your ships."

Claude shrugs with a smile, conceding for the moment, but he's not really going to give it up _that _easy. "Even if it's controlled as tightly as possible?"

"Even then. What do you do?"

"Well, I'm near Alliance waters and I'm not up against the Almyran fleet, which would require totally different tactics," he says, thoughtful, ignoring the equally thoughtful glint in Byleth's gaze. He takes the map with the golden ships set upon it, lines it up next to the sheets of parchment that account for his allotted units and their classifications and skills, and then rests his fingers on both figurines. "So... the main goal is to sink the fleet, because that's the surest way to route it totally, as you specified. Ballistae are slow—too slow. You know what's fast, Teach?"

"It's your exercise," she says. He suspects the tiny hint of dryness in her otherwise serious tone is her way of getting back at him for what she knows is inevitably coming.

"Wyverns," he plows on. "Wyverns are fast, their riders are skilled, and I have more of them on hand than the enemy, whose winged cavalry consists mostly of pegasus knights. In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd say you shifted my balance in favor of air support—so much so that it's more the focus of my army. It's sort of like—I don't know—oops! All wyverns!"

Byleth's fingers twitch, which is a fairly exceptional reaction coming from her. "_Claude."_

_Get to the point,_ she's saying. She has absolutely no patience for showmanship.

"I'm getting there! Just hold on. So, because I have wyverns, and my wyverns have riders with excellent bowmanship, they're likely to know how to handle flaming arrows. After that mock battle we played out, I have a fairly good estimation of the strength of my wyvern riders—they're more likely to win than not against the pegasus knights. What I do is route the pegasus knights first. The units manning my ships will be prioritizing defense—your accuracy is excellent as far as the Alliance's naval strength goes, by the way. Should I be concerned?" Byleth gives him a withering look, or he thinks she means to at least—her face still isn't that expressive, and he's more reading it in the minute tightening of the skin around her eyes and the barest furrow her brow takes on.

He grins. "_Anyways, _while they're doing that, after the knights have been routed, my wyvern riders will prepare their arrows: a hefty mix of flame and explosives, designed to explode upon contact and nothing else. Some of them will hit my ships, sure, but more of them will hit the enemy fleet."

"That's not going to sink them," she points out.

Claude nods. "You're absolutely right, Teach. And that's because the damage that will be caused by those arrows is a distraction. Will it capsize the ships? Maybe not. But left unattended, they almost certainly won't be able to do anything but sink. So with that in hand, my fleet can finally go on the offensive. Air support isn't there to take them down as they board; they'll only have to fight the men on board the ship. That increases their chances of surviving and unifies the army behind a common purpose. Is it a dangerous game to fight on a burning ship? Sure. But that's why there'll be guards at each crossing point."

"And if the guards are killed?"

"Then my orders are for everyone to do what they can to ensure the enemy ships sink, but also to retreat as soon as possible, rejoin the battalions left on our ships, and keep them throwing themselves at us until there are none left. The Alliance navy can win a battle of attrition if need be—they're just more likely to be successful if they've softened their foes up a bit first, you know?"

"I know." Byleth blinks, as if her own words are surprising to her. "I've... seen them in action."

He tries not to lean forward. It's hard work, but she'll withdraw if he shows too much overt interest; she's wary of those who are overintrigued by her spotty past, and if he's honest, which he rarely is, he can understand why when Rhea seems to keep her longer and longer for staff briefings each new moon. Whatever that woman has for Byleth, she's got it bad, and Claude's inkling that it might have to do something with his search for the history behind the Relics and the Crests has only solidified after she practically closed Byleth's hands around the Sword of the Creator and told her to use it as publicly as possible, whenever possible. Maybe she didn't put it that way—but she _meant_ it that way. "You have? When?"

"I'm not sure. Adolescence?" She takes a long sip of tea that does little to mask the discomfort radiating from her. It's still not in her face. It is, however, in the slight hunch to her shoulders and the tight grip she has on the porcelain cup.

For his part, he lets some amusement trickle through. "You're asking me, Teach? I hate to break it to you, but you're still a mystery in almost every respect. Even I'm struggling to find anything concrete about your past."

"I don't know," she says, so quietly that he _does_ have to lean forward to hear it. "You've found out the most. Sometimes I think you know me better than I know myself."

"Jeralt's diary helped me out a great deal. You aren't exactly letting Hanneman near it," he points out. Casual. Easy. Enough so to put a lid on the way her words make his heart start pounding a mile a minute.

She looks up, then, and the small smile on her face makes his heart leap into his throat. "No. I suppose not."

"I appreciate it, by the way." He's babbling. He knows he is. But his heart is sticking in place and making it hard to breathe, and he can ignore that if he just keeps talking. "You letting me borrow it. He loved you more than anything—more than any world that came before. You know? I imagine that's what it's like for most parents with an investment in their children. They want to guide their futures, to protect them. Maybe that's why he was so reluctant to tell you anything. He wanted to keep you safe. It's almost funny—the best way to keep a mercenary's child safe is to put a weapon in their hands and teach them to use it better than anyone else. But that's a way to live, too—"

"Claude," she says softly, taking his hand, still splayed across the map, into hers. He stills. Without seeming to realize it, she's rubbing a soothing circle on the back of his hand with her thumb—something he saw Jeralt do for her in their quietest moments, the ones they hadn't meant for anyone else to see. An expression of... of... "It's okay."

"Right. Okay," he repeats, letting her. It's kind of nice, anyways.

Even if he isn't at all sure that it _is_ okay.

"I miss him. I always will," she continues. "But I'm not alone. And I don't think I will be, with you with me."

Claude swallows. Is it possible to spontaneously combust from the feeling of all your nerves being lit on fire at once? "We're all here for you. All of us in the Golden Deer."

He says it because it's true. Because he wants her to remember that she's helped him build a microcosm of the world he wants to see by drawing in people from all across Fódlan regardless of stature or origin, even if she doesn't know what she's done yet. Because he isn't sure whether or not he's prepared to live with what _you with me_ means—

"I'm truly grateful," Byleth says with the widest smile he's seen from her yet. "Thank you, Claude."

"Any time," he says with a wink, hoping with everything in him that his voice is not as shaken as he feels and that the way he still feels warm, fluttery, and electric from the skim of her rough thumb across the bare skin of the back of his hand doesn't mean what he thinks it might.

They forget about the task at hand, meandering, as they are wont, into other topics of conversation—planning, idle discussion, a more relaxed debate on tactical theory, and all manner of things under the sun. He talks more, but at every turn, he finds himself aware of how he draws her in and gets her to open up. How much he wants to know her. How much he wants her to be able to know _herself,_ because she's been denied something as simple and inherent as self-knowledge, and she's been called the Ashen Demon for it.

He doesn't remember the exercise for a long, long time.

* * *

Claude realizes, or rather gives in to, something terrible the night before the battle for Garreg Mach:

He has fallen in love.

Alone in his room, spread-eagled on the floor because burning through his books on tactics isn't helping, the truth of it simmers in his veins and awakens something in him that he can't shy away from. He covers his face and curls onto his side, a hoarse bark of laughter escaping him.

The conversation he'd had with Byleth earlier lingers in his mind, blotting out all that came before. His concerns over Edelgard's impending attack are still present but dimmer, hushed for the hour he's whiled away in here, because all he can think of is Byleth.

_Friend... Teach... None of these things can encapsulate what you've come to mean to me._

_Our hearts are connected now. And come what may, I know you and I will meet again._

He groans. When he said those things to her, he meant it with everything in him—there hadn't been a shred of dishonesty in his mind at that moment.

In being so honest, he took a big chance. Spoke from the heart. Offered up one of the few remaining parts of himself that retained any degree of vulnerability after his youth. Claude never exactly expected that he'd be so effusive when it came down to it, but, well, apparently this is what it looks like for him, and it's not as surprising as he half thinks it ought to be. He is a beating heart, he is the dream in his mouth, and he holds the color and shape of a hope that he has only just now begun to know deep within himself.

And now he'll have to change more than a few plans to account for it all.

A knock sounds at his door. "Claude?"

Byleth. His heart speeds up. Either she has excellent timing or absolutely terrible; he can't wait to find out which one it is.

"Come in," he calls, scrambling to his feet.

The door creaks open and she steps in, careful even now to refrain from accidentally knocking his piles of books over. He drinks in the sight of her, standing under the firelight in his doorway. She steps in, closes it, and after a brief pause locks it, too. When she turns to face him, her brows are furrowed. There's another storm in her eyes. "Claude."

"Yes, my friend?" he asks instead of the cheeky comment he'd intended to make. He wants to punch himself immediately—his voice is soft, and her eyes widen—but the inclination to do so vanishes with the rest of his coherent thoughts when, in a few quick strides, Byleth meets him in the middle of the room and draws him into a crushing hug.

Her hands are trembling. Finely enough that it's unlikely anyone else would notice. Claude frowns. "Teach?"

She buries her face in the crook of his neck and he finds himself moving automatically, cradling the back of her head, wrapping an arm around her waist. Just like when Jeralt died. He rests his cheek on the top of her head and tries again. "Byleth, my friend... what—"

"I'll protect you," she says, abrupt. Her breath is warm against his neck. She swallows heavily. "I'll protect you—all of you—so don't... don't die, Claude. Promise me."

"I have no intention of dying here," he reminds her, only distantly conscious of the way his fingers slip into her hair.

Byleth lets out a short, strangled breath. "Promise me," she insists.

Claude draws back a little, looking into her eyes. The same terrible knowing she gets whenever something is about to go terribly wrong—and she finds a way, often the narrowest, to avert it—is lodged deep in her, and he knows with the same certainty that she isn't coming to him and asking for this for no reason, or out of fear alone. That she is planning _very_ ahead, very carefully.

He sucks in a breath. Some people believe in gods and goddesses; others in nothing at all, and still others in all manner of things under the sun, full of concepts of eternities and lifetimes, death and rebirth. As a child, he looked to the stars and drew strength from them to forge his own path.

But now? Claude believes in Byleth. He believes in her as a person, as a friend, as a soul connected to his, but also, he thinks, the way some people believe in something else.

_Sun and moon and stars,_ he thinks somewhere deep within himself, studying her steady gaze and remembering the way she cut a path out of the sky. How she tore the fabric of reality open to return to them—to him. Accepting her importance to him doesn't burn as much as he thought it should, just minutes ago. So he tilts his head just the slightest bit and says—"I promise."

Byleth's relief breaks through the storm, like clear skies after devastation.

"I promise," he repeats, "if you promise the same, my friend. None of us want to lose you."

He tacks the last bit on hastily, because some truths are easier to hold to yourself when you're about to fight what will be, in all likelihood, a losing battle. Her relief crumbles. She thinks about it, her eyes downcast, and after several long eternities she lifts her gaze back to his waiting eyes and swallows again.

"I can promise," she says, very careful, "that no matter what it may look like, I will survive. And we will meet again."

He exhales, a shuddering mess of something he'd meant to be steady, entirely too conscious of the close press of their bodies and the way she doesn't seem to want to let go of him. It wasn't the answer he was hoping for. Part of him, the quietest, most fanciful part, imagines that his whole chest is burning with the implications of her words.

But he knows he half-expected something like this.

"Okay," he says. Exhales again. "Okay. I'll take it. I promise, too. I won't die here. And neither will you."

"If you have to run—don't look back—"

"Byleth," he says, gently, and she goes very still. "Death doesn't discriminate. You know that, probably better than I do. It may be the only equal thing about it. Tomorrow will be big—I feel that as much as you do. But tonight, we've done everything that we possibly can to prepare. We've promised each other that we'll do what we can. So..."

What to say next? He isn't sure. He searches for something to fill the gap, something to answer the lingering specter of the way she lost Jeralt, and before he quite knows it, he's speaking again.

"Dance with me," he's saying, and when his brain catches up to his mouth he infuses some much-needed cheer into it. "I'll teach you some good ones. Nothing like those stuffy noble dances."

She looks up at him again, and though the worry is still deeply present, her eyes sparkle at the prospect. His heart skips a beat. "...Okay."

"Just follow my lead," he says with a wink, taking her hands in his as he steps back and kicks some of his books away to clear the floor. "I'll lead you to victory. How about it?"

"Claude," she scolds, that small smile lighting her face up despite herself.

He laughs. "You'll see, Teach. Just wait!"

And she sees—and learns—in record time.

* * *

He spends five years waiting.

Just once, he writes to his mother. Nader takes the letter with him; Claude has been relying more and more on him these days, but he can't be around all the time. The Fódlandians are already suspicious enough of _Nardel _and his credentials. Absence helps the heart grow fonder, or so they say.

_It looks like we really are the same. From our interest in the finest, most clever military stratagems to falling in love on the wrong side of the border._

Honestly, he forgets about it. He's a little busy balancing his life on a wire; maintaining the outward appearance of unity within the Alliance while controlling the flow of information out of the territories and simultaneously fending off the Empire's periodic incursions takes all of his cunning and skill, and he wishes more than once that he would have seen Edelgard coming. It all seems so clear in retrospect, but he'd been so set on the goal of learning all there was to know about the history behind the Crests and the Relics that he'd let himself be blind to her (truthfully) insanely suspicious behavior.

There's never an end to things to be done. He knows that if things get really bad he can always leave, but he owes it to the people of the Alliance to be better than that.

He owes it to Byleth, too. Byleth and the night sky.

The days wind on until they become part of a life, rather than a temporary exclusion from it. When his mother actually takes the time off from waging war eastward to write a reply, it takes him by surprise.

_I'm surprised it took you this long to see it, son. I knew when your letters were more about your professor than about you._

_She might be gone now, but if she's anything like what you've said she was, her return is far from impossible._

_There exist stranger things in this world than many could ever fully dream of, and though I can't devote as much time to research as I'd like, her case has piqued my interest. To my mind, she bears similarities to a few figures that have long appeared in legend, and that's putting aside beings like the Archbishop. Ask Nardel for the books I sent with him; you'll find them helpful enough. Before you ask, they're recent acquisitions._

_When you see this through—when she comes back to you—bring her here, won't you? The situation is not as dire as it was before. Your father and I have been working double time to lay the groundwork for the future, and we are thinking of you, always. War demands much of us all. Know that we are proud of you._

_No matter what._

She signs off with _Affectionately yours,_ and that first bit is definitely a ribbing (however gentle) that only she can really give to him. Claude snorts and looks up to meet Judith's expectant stare.

"She's insultingly well," he tells her with a smile. The rest of it isn't for anyone else to know.

Judith's gaze switches from expectant to knowing. "Finally gave up the ghost, did you, boy?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," he denies, turning toward House Riegan's conference chambers, where the Lords of the Alliance await. Several minutes early. For an _early morning meeting._ That just _can't_ bode well. "We'd better head in. Can't put this one off any longer—this conflict between Count Gloucester and Margrave Edmund really needs to be settled sooner rather than later."

"You're a brat, von Riegan," Judith says, dry, but she wouldn't be here advising him if she thought he was going about this entirely wrong. They just don't have the manpower to do what he really wants to do.

Claude only smiles again. It's true, after all.

* * *

The Goddess Tower is, in ruination, far more peaceable than he'd ever felt it to be in its prime. Anything of importance in it is long since gone, and even the bandits camping out near the foot of the monastery have left it to crumble. Claude can only bring himself to feel a dispassionate regret about it; his only connection to the tower, specifically, is that night he spent with Byleth, hiding from the ball and the eyes of most, if not all, of the Officers' Academy. On some abstract level, he can regret that the beauty of the monastery has been thoroughly tarnished. If he said he was grieving it, though, he'd probably be lying.

He still isn't exactly a religious man.

Religious or not, though, he doesn't need to hide from prying eyes today. He's quite alone. That's a tad disappointing, but what's there to be done about it?

No sooner does the thought cross his mind than footsteps sound somewhere near the bottom of the tower.

His heartbeat picks up in a way it hasn't in years. He knows the _tap-tap-tap_ of those boots, the surprisingly heavy gait of that walk; when she isn't using the stealth skills she picked up in all those years spent classified as an assassin in her father's mercenary company, Byleth has no compunctions about her presence being known.

It's early still, the dawn just barely lightening into day, the sun making its way up in the sky. Claude regulates his breathing as best he can, eyes locked on Fódlan's Throat, so far in the distance that it's near faded into the same blue that the sky is.

She stands for a long moment at the top of the stairs before she speaks. "...Claude?"

"You overslept, Teach," he says, turning at the sound of her, something vibrant and triumphant unfurling in him with such a ferocity that he finds his feet carrying him towards her before he knows it. "Pretty rude to keep a fella waiting like that, wouldn't you say?"

"Claude," she breathes. Has his name always been a kind of language for her, or has it been so long that she's forgotten how to say anything else? Her voice is scratchy. Like she hasn't spoken in years. He draws close, close enough that she has to look up at him to keep meeting his gaze, and he tucks a disheveled lock of hair back behind her ear, where he's fairly certain it would normally go. There's wonder in her eyes. Confusion, too. The tells are the same; his memory hasn't faded.

"What's with that surprised look, my friend? You didn't really think I'd given up on you coming back, did you?" he asks, and she smiles.

She smiles. Full-blown, full-faced, genuine, sparkling eyes—the full works.

_I love you, _he thinks. His heart pulses in his chest. _I still love you and it's been five years. I love you and it's not going to stop any time soon. _He puts a hand on her shoulder instead of saying that.

"Can you feel it? A new dawn is finally here." He turns to the broken gap in the wall, the one the sunlight is streaming through, and feels physically aware of the way she moves to peer out with him—of how she leans into his hand, and leans against him when he wraps his arm around her shoulder. She's back. She came back to him. To them. "Not just for us, though. No. For all of Fódlan."

And he means it, even if the hope burning in him is currently reveling in her return to him, specifically.

"You... kept our promise," she says, and coughs at the end of it.

Claude unhooks his canteen from his belt, offering it to her, and she gratefully takes it. As she drinks, he watches her. "So did you."

"It took me so long. I was sleeping. I didn't know..." For the first time since he's met her, the disorientation she's expressed several times verbally makes it all the way to the look on her face. She frowns. "Claude... Five years. I didn't know—I had to be told. I'm so sorry."

With a sharp sigh, he gathers her into his arms and holds her tightly to him, ignoring the canteen being crushed up against his chest alongside her metal vambraces. What she _means_ by that he has absolutely no idea—but he's run over their last full conversation before the battle for Garreg Mach in his head countless times, enough so that it's a well-worn groove in his mind, and it tracks with what she didn't know then.

If he stretches that a little bit, it also tracks with the absolutely insane but increasingly likely hypothesis he's developed over the years, the one regarding that terrible certainty she always tempered with analysis and concerted realism.

If he said it didn't matter, he'd be lying, but—"I never stopped believing in you, my friend. Besides. You're here now."

"I'm here," she echoes, awkwardly shimmying the canteen down to hook it back not to his belt, but to hers. She slips her arms around his waist and buries her face in his chest.

He closes his eyes and lets himself rest his forehead against the side of her head—more her hair than anything else. Wherever she's been, she smells like river gunk. "Welcome back." _Welcome home._

She doesn't say anything else, but her arms tighten around him. That's enough a response in and of itself.

* * *

Byleth is putting up a good front—an amazing front, actually, Claude's more than a little impressed considering how much she's feeling and experiencing for the first time—but there are cracks in the facade, and he knows she needs something more than a few kind words and a grave that the bandits never touched.

She doesn't linger by Jeralt's grave like she did before the war, with her head bent over it in quiet contemplation. What she does do, on every other free day she has, is fill his old canteen up with something so strong it makes Claude's nose hairs peel just from the smell of it and pour it out on the grass around the grave like an offering; then she lays out on the ground alongside it and watches the stars, because she never does this during the day.

Some time before Ailell, he starts joining her. Always quietly. When he brings mead of a kind his own father and mother favor back in Almyra, Byleth's eyes go wide. "That was his favorite."

"It was?" Claude asks. He doesn't need to mask his own shock—it's difficult to get this stuff anywhere outside of Almyra. At least, it is unless you're Nader the Undefeated, and you occasionally take pity on your poor student's state of missing his homeland and foist more bottles than is strictly safe upon his person.

Byleth nods, turning the bottle over, and she traces the label with a dry fondness that has him holding his breath. "How he managed to keep a steady supply on hand, I don't know. Our jobs very rarely took us to Almyra. I never got to go past the border."

"Huh. Did you want to?" His shoulder is brushing against hers as they sit, crosslegged and side by side, at the grave. The night is clear and the stars are bright, while the moon is new, and in this light, with the way her hair is wisping across his dark wrap with the emblem of the Leicester Alliance on it, he sees it like starlight. His starlight.

She turns to him with knowing in her gaze. "I'm not sure I ever knew when I wanted anything. But my father always promised me he'd show me everywhere he'd been. Almyra was definitely one of those places."

So yes, in other words. Or the closest thing he's going to get to a yes. If the stories his mother told him as a child about the wandering mercenary who accidentally solved Almyra's succession crisis by teaming up with her to find his father are true, Jeralt almost certainly went to Almyra. But that's a tale for another time. He leans a little closer and savors the way her breath hitches in her throat. "Say, Teach. I can't say I've been more places than Jeralt, if he lived for as long as I think he did, but I've been a fair few places. How about this? When the war is over, you and I can go anywhere you want to go. You've been all over Fódlan, but beyond that is uncharted territory for you, in a manner of speaking. Right?"

"I've read about other places, but I've never been," she confirms, eyes on Jeralt's grave. She looks up at him with something new on her face—it takes him a moment, but he realizes it's excitement. "And we do want to walk in step together..."

He feels almost giddy that she remembers. He knows the smile on his face is too wide for most people to believe, but it's all real. These moments, the two of them sitting by a dead man's grave, somewhere between late evening and the dead of night, is all the time they really have to talk this way. "That's right. I still very much want that, my friend. And I believe in planning for our new tomorrow—because it is going to come, when we win this. That's what all of this is for."

"I... look forward to that day." She leans into him a little more, some of the excitement fading as the weary reality of their present circumstances settle back in around them, and the silence makes for something like a third companion as they sit together with their thoughts. He isn't sure how much time passes before she shatters the quiet with a jaw-cracking yawn. "Perhaps... I should get to sleep..."

She says that, but she doesn't seem all that inclined to move. Claude huffs a little breath of a laugh, wrapping his arm around her waist, easy as you please, and thinks about how the next few moments could play out. "Should I carry you back? Are your godly powers tiring you out?"

"Claude," she sighs. "I don't know how all that works. Not fully. Passing out in the Sealed Forest was not something I anticipated. Besides, you had Hilda carry me back."

He turns so she can see the teasing smile on his face. Yes, it made him angry once—jealous, more like—but now, whatever else lingers, he wants the relationship between them to be a place for her to breathe. She may have agreed to his plans of her own free will, but still—"I figured if that power could leak out and impact someone else, she would be the best recipient. All that battlefield prowess, you know?"

"She's stronger than she wants to acknowledge, and kinder than she wants people to believe," is Byleth's murmured response; she slings her arm across his chest, and her hand dangles over his shoulder as she tucks her cold nose into the crook of his neck. "Any power I could give her would only be a bonus to the strength that already lies within."

Her words bring him back to the night they met. When she protected Edelgard on what almost looked like pure instinct.

That same furious kindness that so captivated him at first still lives in her now—and it's triply in force given the time she had to get to know them before the war.

"Always the teacher, huh," he says.

Byleth surprises him when she sighs into his collarbone. "I'm hardly a teacher."

"You are kidding, right? You? _Hardly_ a teacher? Being a mercenary doesn't exactly disqualify you from knowing how to teach, my friend, and I know you weren't given any choice in the matter, but I also happen to know that everyone who's in the Golden Deer has ended up where they are now because of your guidance. And the effort you put into learning how to guide us." He stands, picking her up as he does, giving her a winning smile in response to the deadpan look she gives him. There's warmth in that gaze—and her actions have often spoken louder than her words. The way she's curling into him...

His heart flutters.

They may have far too much left to be done before they can really answer the spark between them, but in these moments, they have this.

She's silent for a few moments as he starts walking away from Jeralt's grave. "Was it me," she asks, quietly, "or was it her?"

Claude nearly stops. _Nearly_ because he knows exactly who she means by "her", and he isn't sure he entirely knows how to even broach the topic, but however he's going to do it—because he is—it's something best addressed behind closed doors. Still, he can't quite help himself; he's not enough of a fool to take leave of his senses and the possibility that they might be overheard, and neither is she, but he does lean in close to her ear. "Byleth... I may not know how your powers work, either, but I do know something else. Something that matters to me. You're your own person before you're anyone else. No matter what Rhea might have wanted you to be, or what Sothis might have been."

"Maybe," she replies, uncertainty threaded through her voice.

"It's also true," he says, softly, taking another risk, "regardless of what anyone else might want you to be. Regardless of what _I _might want you to be. You are Byleth Eisner. Only you get to decide what that means."

Byleth is silent the rest of the way to her room. All the world lies in the way her hand curls into the fabric of his Leicester wrap. Her thumb wears small circles into one of the stars on the emblem; he feels it all the way down to his skin, despite wearing three layers, and the part of him that's always calculating and evaluating sits quietly for a moment as he wishes to the bone that she ever had the option to choose herself.

With her, he can do anything. They all knew, him and Dimitri and Edelgard alike, that Byleth's allegiance would be key in the coming years, even if they didn't know why on that very first night. Ignoring that, or refusing to look at it because it prods at the guilt set somewhere deep in his soul, would do a disservice to everything they have become.

But he would hope—does hope, fervently—that she felt like she had a choice. That she continues to have one. She agreed to come with him to Alliance territory to convince the lords to lend them their support, but—

"Claude," she says when they're standing at her door. Her hand tightens briefly on his shoulder. "I trust you."

He tries to tamp down on his initial reflex, which is to smile. Instead, he clasps her wrist with both hands, light and unfettering, and lets himself watch her watching him. "Thank you, my friend. I don't take that trust lightly."

"I know." She smiles. Pats his cheek with her free hand. "But don't worry. If I have problems with your methods, I let you know, don't I? I wouldn't be here if I wanted to be elsewhere."

"Picked up on that, huh? And here I thought I had grown more skillful in my old age," he says, voice airy, eyes straying to the Garreg Mach cat watching their exchange. It's the calico kitten, he realizes, now grown—the one that was always fond of Byleth, and he thinks it may be the only other creature in this world that waited as long for her as he did. Even as he watches its ears twitch, it saunters up to her and weaves its way around her ankles with affection.

Byleth shakes her head. "I'm your friend." _So I know you._

Claude reaches out and tucks a stray lock of hair back behind her ears, where she usually keeps it. It bounces back. She's forgotten to comb it again. "Then I'll try not to. Just..."

"It's alright," she says again, more firmly, pushing up on her toes to reach him. With her hands on her shoulders, she presses a kiss to his cheek. "Your dreams... the world you want to see... I want to see that world too."

His mind is suddenly empty. He thinks he can feel every nerve in his body, acute and real, like he only ever has at a few points in his life—and so many of them around her, one of maybe four people to have ever gotten close enough to him to see the good and the bad alike. When did his arms find their way around her again? She brushes her thumb across his cheekbone, something playful and light and satisfied lurking in her eyes. "I..."

"If you want to stay," Byleth murmurs, "you're welcome to."

"With that kind of invitation, how could I refuse?" Claude asks. Control comes back to him in stages: first his breath, then his arms, then his beating heart, all with an almost unbearable lightness for how new the sensation feels. The little calico cat _mrew_s, demanding their attention. He looks down. As soon as Byleth unlocks the door and opens it a crack, it darts in and curls up at the foot of her bed. He laughs—okay, giggles, almost, he'll admit to that, what with his nerves—and takes Byleth's hand. "Looks like I'm not the only one who's taking you up on that."

Byleth just smiles. "Miyu does like to keep me company, but I'm surprised to see her on a clear night. She doesn't like storms. The first time she took shelter with me, there was lightning."

"You named her... _Mew?"_

"Yes," she says, amused and quizzical as she leads him in. "Is there something wrong with that?"

"No. Nope, nothing wrong with that," he says with a grin. _I'll have to make arrangements for this cat to come with us when we're done here, won't I?_

* * *

"Claude."

Something warm is on top of him. Someone's mouth is near his ear.

"Claude, wake up."

He grumbles wordlessly, not quite willing to give up the blissful state of being that is sleep—particularly not when his ability to get a good, uninterrupted chunk of sleep in is basically nil, given that it's wartime and he's one of the clowns running the circus. "Few more minutes."

"I had an idea."

"We all do sometimes," he mumbles. Byleth lets out a puff of hot air as he wraps his arms around her and buries his face in his shoulder, trying to block out the light. Derdriu's mornings are unbearably bright at this time of the year, even in the earliest hours, and it brings to mind a series of memories saturated in a hollow feeling. The seaside towns he passed through with his parents as a child have lingered in him despite his best efforts; even with Byleth at his side, he'd rather wait til noon to face the day.

He has been sleeping better in the past few days, though. This new arrangement between them isn't bad. At all. He might even venture to call it very good.

As he wakes more fully and surrenders the possibility of getting back to sleep, it occurs to him that he's... grateful. Sooner or later, he's going to have to find the time to reckon with all of this—with how different the world looks from when he was a child. It's only natural for the dreams of a child to morph into something new as time goes on, but he knows he never could have predicted that he would find someone like Byleth. Someone who can match him. He still doesn't quite believe in providence, but if it exists, the night they met was awash in it.

"Rhea technically gave me her power and title," Byleth is saying, "but I wouldn't know how to use it to its fullest extent. I brought some material to study what it all entails, but the presence of a Knight could help. Both for questions and appearances."

Claude hums. "Who did you have in mind?"

"...Shamir. Logistically, though, it could be difficult."

"She's a good choice. For multiple reasons." He considers, opening his eyes to meet her steady gaze. "Let's ask her what she thinks. If worst comes to worst, you could just start imitating Seteth. I've heard enough sermons from him to last a lifetime."

Byleth's smile is small, but it's there. "You went to three. At most."

"You wound me. How could I be accused of impiety, I ask you? Me of all people?" Claude clutches his heart in dramatic shock, looking at her with a wide-eyed expression.

"I know because those were the three I went to," Byleth says, something dry making its way into her voice. "You helped me with lesson plans during the rest of them."

He grins. "Oh, right. You just so happened to have your prep time blocked out for the usual sermon hour."

"It's good that you've been coming with me to pay my respects to my father. He's the one who arranged that for me."

"Thank you, Jeralt," Claude says. He closes his eyes. "For that, and for taking care of Byleth."

"What are you—?" Byleth asks.

He shrugs, keeps his voice light. "Whether or not the dead can hear us, I think the occasional bout of gratitude isn't unwarranted. You know? And he did. Take care of you, I mean."

She's silent, thoughts flickering behind her eyes, and when he leans forward he watches those thoughts skitter to a stop as her gaze drops to his lips. He smiles because he can't help it—because she's here, and her hair is strewn across his pillows like it belongs there, and because he wants what she does just as much as she does, and they may be in the middle of a war, but they have each other.

They have a place to rest.

"Thank you, Claude," she says. She reaches out to him and cups his face with a calloused hand, the rough pad of her thumb rubbing small circles in his beard. He leans into her touch with a pleased little hum. The heat that has begun to build in his body is for once welcome, rather than a dangerous and unnecessary distraction from the necessities of leadership and the orchestration of his schemes. "You're good to me."

"Don't thank me too quickly. It was my idea to use you as a symb_mmph—"_ Byleth's kiss is intent and intense, and Claude's brain, not quite up and ready to start the day but already spinning with plans and ideas and countermeasures, goes blissfully silent.

* * *

"You're looking happier these days," Hilda says with sparkling eyes after the latest conference on how to approach Enbarr ends, and that's how Claude knows mischief is afoot.

He raises a brow. "We're approaching the end of the war. Less death and destruction, more rebuilding and reunification—what's not to be hopeful about?"

"What indeed," she muses. "Could it have anything to do with how the Professor has been sleeping in her own room less and less these days?"

"Wow. Has she? This is the first I've heard about it. Absolutely shocking," Claude says mildly. "It's not like Leonie has been prowling around the monastery trying to figure out her new location so she can keep standing guard outside Byleth's room at night or anything."

Hilda leans back in her conference chair with a deep sigh. "Oh, _Claude,_ she's only trying to help."

"She also needs to take care of herself. We can't have commanders exhausting themselves to the point of distraction, not for the march on Enbarr, and besides. I'm concerned." He busies himself with collecting his papers and maps, pretending not to see the way Hilda is studying him with open curiosity—and beyond that, something warmer. Pride, maybe. It's not that he minds, necessarily, not now, after she's worked with him for five years to keep the Alliance in balance and thrown herself (and Lorenz) into its political affairs with aplomb, but it's never exactly a comfortable experience, being seen.

The silence stretches on. When he's collected all his things and tapped them on the table to straighten them up, Hilda speaks. "She really has been good for you, hasn't she? The Professor." She pauses, then sounds almost embarrassed, as if saying her name is something near profane. "Byleth."

It occurs to him, in that moment, that he's usually the only one to call Byleth by her given name. For some reason, the thought puts him in a mood to go and find her—maybe she's already fishing, or helping out in the greenhouses, or running errands around the monastery. Always helping people, she is.

"Who knows?" he says, careful and casual, because this is a piece of himself he's not entirely accustomed to, and the part of him that has always been alone knows Hilda could use that against him if she really wanted to.

She doesn't. She won't, he reminds himself.

Hilda just sighs again with a deeply self-satisfied smile, standing up and stretching her arms. "No, I know I'm right this time. And I'm willing to bet it goes further back than anyone else would imagine, right? It's almost like... from the moment you met her, you started changing. The Claude I knew six years ago wouldn't have told me that he was concerned for Leonie. He would've nudged the people around her into doing something about it, or just left it alone. But here you are. Being honest. Just like our Professor."

"I don't know about _honest,"_ he says, feeling very much like he did the time his mother sussed out that his dream was to bust open Fódlan's Throat and break down the barriers of the world. "But she certainly has taught me a great deal. I owe her."

He owes Byleth everything, really, in his mind. His life, his heart, the unbelievably wild prospect of his dream coming true—

The ring in the inside pocket of his jacket burns hot.

The world beyond Fódlan sits at the edge of his horizon, beyond the setting sun, beyond her.

But never without her.

Hilda's smiling with her eyes again, that funny, rare expression that he only ever sees her make with the Golden Deer around. "Got somewhere to be?"

"I think I do. See you later, Hilda." He tucks his maps under his arm and makes his way out of the conference room with a spring in his step.

* * *

Alone in the conference room, Hilda takes a moment to breathe. Navigating a conversation with Claude when he's in a cagey mood is always so _exhausting._

Then she laughs to herself, something a little more honest than the polite giggles she makes in company, and happily sets about to closing the room up for the day. "I have _got_ to start planning for their wedding. Hmm, and what do I want to be called...? Auntie? Aunt Hilda? I _hope_ that doesn't make me sound old. Maybe we all grow old, someday—outside of wartime, I suppose..."

Claude had better thank her for running interference by taking Leonie to accessory crafting lessons all those times he went to keep the Professor company by her father's grave. Free access to Almyran wood for her accessories sounds about good. It's not like there'll be a downside for him, either; the accessories will be for everyone in the Golden Deer, to commemorate winning the war.

When they win it. Because they will. Hilda's not exactly the type of girl to believe in something that's never really shown itself in her life, but it's not like that's true of Claude and the Professor's leadership.

Together, the two of them can do anything.

It's that, more than anything, that has kept Hilda in this war. She has faith in them—even if she doesn't quite know how she feels about the world they've been quietly laying out plans for, with the two of them at the helm, she's got a feeling that the "new dawn" Claude likes to talk about is going to be something beautiful.

(Not that she'd ever tell them that in so many words. Heaven for_bid._ She'd never hear the end of it, and then Holst would cry because he always knew she had a good bone in her, and then she'd end up as head of House Goneril despite all her hard work at being lazy—nope, better keep it to herself.)

(For now.)

* * *

When it comes to it, learning the truth about the Relics isn't the most surprising thing in the world. Ghastly, yes, disturbing, certainly; but like his mother said to him in that singular letter in those years he spent without Byleth, there are stranger things under the sun than most people are aware of. The hands of man are not the only things on this earth that have put the wretched and the divine to their own purposes, and the more he studies, the more he sees that those who slither in the dark, terrifying and unknown as they are, are only the beginning of a long legacy of peoples disenfranchised by the Church of Seiros.

So much history—and knowledge—has been lost. Especially in Fódlan, where the church is central, even after five years at war without an Archbishop carefully guiding its political development. (More like stunting, if you ask him, but Seteth had only given him access to his office and the secret places where he stored all the texts he deemed "improper" for the public library under the qualification that it could be necessary for planning the attack on Enbarr.)

Looking upon Rhea now, humbled as she is, her hands clutching at Byleth's cape, Claude still doesn't feel much in the way of warmth or pity.

"Please," she's saying. "Fódlan's bloody history... the Red Canyon Tragedy... it cannot be allowed to happen again."

"I will not let it happen again," Byleth says. Claude wonders if Rhea can hear the undertone of discomfort. She's holding herself very still, her shoulders bunched with discomfort, and he knows that if _he's_ a little horrified that he's used Failnaught without a thought for five bloody years, it can only be worse for Byleth.

Byleth who bears the Crest of Flames. Byleth who wields the Sword of the Creator.

Byleth, whom Sothis chose to become a part of, rather than overtaking and consuming.

"_She said... 'it is within you that I found my power yet again.' And then she merged with me." Something complicated simmers in her eyes. He cups her face. "Claude... I don't know what to do with that."_

"_She chose you," Claude says, as gently as he can. "Don't forget that."_

"It would be best if you were to rest up, Rhea," Claude says, coming to stand at Byleth's side. When she pulls away from Rhea and looks at him with that same complicated expression on her face, he wraps his arm around her waist. "We've got to plan for Shambhala. And I'm sure your people are waiting eagerly for you to present yourself to them, fully healed."

Rhea looks up at him then with something weary lurking in the curve of her spine, lingering in the disheveled state of her otherwise immaculate hair. She doesn't bother to get up. In the late afternoon light, there's a hint of a feral snarl in the way she grimaces at him. "You have always been a deeply clever young man, Claude."

"I've been accused of that before, but I find there's not much use in making assumptions about people," he tells her as neutrally as he can muster. Partially because he can't quite help himself. Partially because he can, and it's something she needs to hear.

Byleth deserved, and still deserves, far better than Rhea.

"I grow tired. I must rest," Rhea murmurs, something bitter in the way her eyes meet Claude's. "Please, both of you... leave me, and go to do your duty."

"As you wish." Claude bows lightly. Byleth gives her a muted farewell. They exit the room in silence.

He, for one, fancies that Rhea is boring holes into their backs with the way she stares after them. It _feels_ that way, at least. He knows what it's like, being looked at by someone who wants to put a dagger in your back.

"...I still have the power of the Archbishop," are Byleth's eventual words, long after they've retreated to the outdoor terrace he favors on the evenings she doesn't spend by her father's grave. She leans back in her seat and sighs. "If nothing else, I'll put the issue of succession to rest. I don't relish the prospect of her in command again. Neither do I feel I should retain that power indefinitely."

The words are spoken quietly and with very little lip movement. They're only meant for him. He puts his elbow on the table that Cyril brought out for them and rests his chin in his hand, surveying her. "I'm sorry."

"What for?" she asks, looking up with surprise.

As if it was all a matter of course—to be expected. He thinks of his grandfather in Almyra, long since dead, and the way he had looked at a ten-year-old Claude with a coolness in his demeanor.

_There will be a succession crisis in your time,_ he'd told Claude's father, ignoring everyone else in the throne room. _Send the boy away. It's for his own good. _

A small smile pulls at the corners of his lips. "Family isn't all it's cracked up to be. And you have one that's more messed up than most."

"...It doesn't feel real," Byleth admits with a frown. "But there's little point in dwelling on it. We have one more battle, and then ahead of that, we have your new world to build."

"That's true, but you're forgetting one thing." He reaches over and tangles her fingers with his, thinking for at least the fifth time (on this day alone!) of the ring; he's carried it on him from the moment he picked it up from the blacksmith. The way her face goes pink makes his heart pick up. He grins at her, something heady in his chest and in his veins. "It's not just _my_ world. It's yours, too. I mean that, and I'll remind you as many times as I need to."

"Claude," she says, a reluctant smile curving her lips. The sound of his name, spoken by her, is his favorite sound in the world.

If his face freezes like this, it might not be a _bad_ thing. At least until the next time he finds himself in a hostage situation. Then again—it could be useful in that situation, too. Who knows? "So long as we walk in step together, my friend, I'm confident that you and I can tackle anything."

"Then let's get to planning." One calloused thumb brushes affectionately over his cheek; the other rubs a comforting circle into the skin of his hand. "We'll need every bit of your cunning and my skill to make our dream a reality."

And they do.

* * *

Morning on Almyra's coast is cool and clear, with the promise of heat on the horizon. Claude watches the line where the ocean and the sky meet for an unhurried moment—the window provides a pretty good view, at any rate, and it'd be a shame to waste it. Ignatz would practically salivate at the chance to paint this scenery, but he's busy pulling strings to restore Garreg Mach to its full glory.

_Hmm... might not be a bad idea to propose another meet-up,_ he muses to himself. _Five years or so ought to do. Darya will be old enough to appreciate the trip by then, won't she? It's not like our kingdoms aren't united..._

"Claude..." Byleth's voice comes from the bed, warm and laced with an unspoken request for his attention. He turns and has to stifle the laughter in his chest.

Darya is doing her level best to melt into Byleth, burying herself in her mother's chest with aplomb; practically all that can be seen of their daughter is her dark curls, stubborn and wild and absolutely tangled from a long night of tossing and turning between them, and the sun-tanned little arm thrown around Byleth's waist in the same tight clutch he knows he, himself, holds her with. He takes in the sight of it with an overwhelming affection. Before he knows it, he's made his way back to the bed and curled himself around both of them, meeting Byleth's exasperated gaze with a coy smile—one that only grows more smug when Darya mumbles a happy, if sleepy, _Papa._

"I need to use the facilities," Byleth deadpans. "Take over for me."

"Whatever you wish, my love," Claude says in his soppiest voice, gently pulling their daughter into his arms and stroking her hair when she pops open one mint green eye to glare at him. "We'll wait here... desperately... until the day we meet again—"

Byleth coughs to disguise her laughter, drapes the blankets over the crown of Darya's head, and bolts out of the room.

Silence passes between father and daughter. He closes his eyes and listens to the sound of her breathing. _One, two, three..._

"Papa," Darya starts sleepily—right on cue, he thinks, keeping his face even despite the huge smile threatening to break out, "where on earth did Mama find you? She's too good for you."

He can't help it. He laughs.

"Even my own daughter thinks her mother is too good for me, huh," he teases when he manages to contain himself. There's a lightness in his chest that he never once imagined he would one day feel. But here he is, past the end of the war, seeing out his dreams. Living his life—with Byleth at his side. With him at her side. He couldn't ask for anything more. "As it happens, my dear, she found me in a village in Fódlan. Her father was there at the time, too."

"Grandpa is a rock," Darya contradicts. "How can he move?"

Claude ruffles her hair. His three-year-old might be startlingly clever and articulate, but she hasn't had cause to have the reality of death impressed upon her yet. He's determined to make sure she won't have to do that at too young an age. "He wasn't a rock then. He was a strong mercenary, one who led a skilled mercenary company, with your mother as his right hand..."

The tale takes until noon. Byleth comes back halfway through and contributes her own pieces of the story, edited and mostly appropriate for a three-year-old who's too clever not to pick up on the threads they don't follow through on; they don't end up getting around to what they'd planned to do that day, but they do end up in one of the main wyvern hatcheries in Almyra. He and Byleth follow Darya with careful eyes—young wyverns aren't always broken in right away—but it turns out that they have very little need for worry. One of the wyvern mothers takes one sniff of Darya and fusses over her like she would her own clutch for the rest of the visit.

It occurs to him that evening that the town is the very same town he spent a good few months in with his parents as a child. Here, more than quite a few other places, he got into scraps with other children in the back alleys. It was here that he learned to tolerate his poisons, get back at his enemies, and plan for the future. He hums, folding up a faded diagram of the Crest of Riegan.

Byleth wraps her arms around him from behind and he doesn't flinch. He only leans his head back with a lazy smile, raising his hand to cup her face. "Is Darya asleep?"

"For now," Byleth says. "My father was a light sleeper, too."

"He'd almost have to be. But I'm afraid that her sleep issues probably come from every part of her bloodline." He closes his eyes when she bends down to press a kiss to his forehead, then his lips. Against the soft pressure of her mouth, he mumbles: "You know I'm the same way."

"When I'm not with you, I have my own troubles," she murmurs.

He smiles. The comparison is a dark one, he knows, but with him, she sleeps like the living dead. "Good thing we don't have to be apart. I'd hate for you to have to deal with that again."

"Mm. Why are you looking at Crest diagrams again?"

"Just thinking. When I was a child, I couldn't have imagined that the truth behind them would be so grim." Claude sighs. "I only thought of how useful they would be. How much I needed power to make my dream a reality. And I wasn't _wrong,_ exactly—the Crests and the Relics we had on our side? Powerful. Immensely so. But power alone doesn't make an army. Or a nation. We won because our friends believed in us. We were able to build this peace because our people believed in us. And now we're doing our best to honor that belief—which, believe me, is not something I have regrets about. It's just... the me of fifteen years ago probably wouldn't recognize the me of today. Even the me of the Officers' Academy might not recognize me."

Byleth hums in acknowledgment, slipping around the chair to sit in his lap. "And?"

"And... that's it," he says, almost surprised to find that it's true. "It's not a bad thing, I think. Just interesting to realize. Before I met you, I never would have considered how important trust is to belief."

"Before I met you, I wouldn't have thought of myself as anything other than a weapon," is Byleth's response after silent contemplation. "Maybe that's love."

Claude blinks. "You think? Huh."

"I'm not the most sentimental," she acknowledges in response to his silent surprise at her being the one to say such a thing, "but I think it's true. I started changing when I met you. And when I loved you, there was no going back."

"When did you know?" Claude asks, fascinated—as always—by the way she flushes, a pretty pink that goes all the way to the tips of her ears.

Byleth coughs. "...The night of the ball."

"Really?" He leans into her. "You know, for someone who saw herself as fundamentally without emotion, you sure caught on quick. I didn't know until just before the invasion, but I definitely wanted to kiss you before then."

"Do you want to kiss me now?" she asks, the barest trace of impatience in her voice. He's hovering just above her lips, his every breath grazing her sensitive skin; his nerves are already igniting, and really, he can't blame her. He _does._ He wants her with everything in him, and he always will.

So he says "I think so, yes," and captures her lips, pleased as a cat in the sun to feel her smile against him.

The Heroes' Relics are forgotten, even in the back of his mind. Byleth encompasses all of it: every sensation, every thought, every feeling.

Claude has more than a dream now. He has the life he's built with her.

He has every intention of living it to the fullest.

* * *

**does he know? does claude von riegan know how much i love him?**

**thank you to klairevoyance for willingly reading this when it was a wip! please read klaire's work, i owe "a heart without strings" my life**

**i spent like two months writing this on and off-hope you all enjoy, fear the deer!**


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